I am new to Houdini.

Is there a way to export particles as a .prt file for use in RealFlow?

Also, is there a Maya equivalent of a Plugin Manager in Houdini? I do not know how to look for plugins I have installed. There is an old RealFlow plugin for Houdini but after installing it I can't see it anywhere.

I have an old version of Houdini which does not have the Houdini Engine plugin for Maya, so I would also like to know how to import particles in to Maya without using this plugin. Is there a conversion script?

Hey

About your first question I'm not RF user but I think it is supporting Alembic format, You can export your particles from Houdini with Alembic file very well.

About your next question I would say there is no exactly same thing in the Houdini as usually there is no need to install a lots of Plug-ins in Houdini, You can do anything inside Houdini without any need to install plug-in.

Mostly we are using Digital-Assets rather than Plug-ins. in Assets->Asset Manager menu you can find out which Digital Assets are installed in your Houdini.

Of course we have few HDK Plug-ins for Houdini too, But there is no plug-manager for them (if I'm not wrong :cool, these are dll files which usually installed on DSO folder.

You can get some information about these plug-ins with dsoinfo [www.sidefx.com] command.

You should execute this command in Windows->Hscript Textport window.

Thanks for your reply Sadjad.

Is there a tutorial on how to export alembic particles? PRT would be better since I want to use Krakatoa to render them.

I have a very old version of Houdini - version 13, so maybe this is why I can't find an Assets menu?

I have found a plugin for exporting PRT files, but can’t make sense of the instructions. What is meant by “node path” and how would I find this in my project? Presumably this replaces the “/obj/location_particles/import_location” part:

To perform an export, open Python inside Houdini and use the following commands (Substitute your own node path and file path):
import Krakatoa
Krakatoa.exportParticles( hou.node( “/obj/location_particles/import_location” ), “my_path/output_particles.prt” )

Hi

– Sorry I don't remember what was it in H13 exactly, search for OTL Manager or something like that in File Menu !

In old versions we called Houdini Digital Asset,Otl file.

– when you use Particle system in Houdini, you should have a sop node to import simulated particles from Autodopnetwork to Geometry Network, this node is dop I/O or dop import.

According to instruction you should use full path of this node.

E.g if you use simple particle system from the shelf(Source Particle Emitter), it would add 2 new node in Object Level(scene network), these nodes are AutoDopNetwork and source_particle.
If you jump inside of source_particle node, you can find import_source node and that's a one.

So your full path from top is :
/obj/source _particle/import_source

The PRT export plugin made for Houdini hasn't worked since H15 or 16, can't remember. Nothing updated since then.

So is there no way to export particle files for use in Krakatoa or Realflow?